Antarctica's giant iceberg has been photographed in striking new detail

A zoomed-in view of Antarctica's Larsen C ice shelf, and iceberg A-68, on July 28, 2017.Deimos Imaging, an UrtheCast CompanyIn early July, a rift in Antarctica's Larsen C ice shelf caused the third-largest iceberg ever recorded to break off.

The block of ice, dubbed iceberg A-68, may hang around for years in the open sea, and it is awesome in scale: roughly the area of Delaware, the mass of 5.6 Mount Everests, and voluminous enough to fill Lake Erie — more than twice.

Because it's the middle of winter in Antarctica, though, scientists have struggled to get good optical images of the iceberg. So far, they've relied on polar satellites like Sentinel-1, which uses radar to see through thick cloud cover.

However, a few days of clear weather in late July gave Deimos-1 and Deimos-2 — a pair of satellites that operate as a tag-team — a clear, visible-light view of the scene on the eastern Antarctic Peninsula.

"[T]hese images are striking — easily the best I have seen since calving," Adrian Luckman, a glaciologist at Swansea University and a member of the Antarctic research program Project Midas, told Business Insider in an email.

Here are the new photos, released by Deimos Imaging and Urthecast in an August 3 blog post, and what they show.

This story was updated to include comments by Adrian Luckman.

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Deimos-1 and Deimos-2 follow similar orbits and work together to image the same spots on the ground in medium- and very-high-resolution.

In late July, the satellites passed over the Antarctic Peninsula and the eastern edge of its Larsen C ice shelf — where iceberg A-68 had broken off of two weeks earlier.

A map of Antarctica's biggest ice shelf systems. Larsen C was the fourth-largest — now the fifth-largest — until iceberg A68's calving between July 10 and July 12, 2017.Diti Torterat/Wikipedia (CC BY 2.0)

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Deimos-1 captured the iceberg in this wider-angle. "This is actually then first visible-light image of A68 that I have seen," Luckman said, "and it shows nicely how the perennial sea ice in the Weddell Sea is hemming A68 in and will probably keep it where it is for a long time."